Dead Star, Apparitions
Because Of Life In The Meaning Of Physics
The Fear That Is Nothing At All
The Culture Of Cosmology

Dead Star, Apparitions

If a car parks at the beach, you make yourself cozy with bags of sunflower seeds;
the ache of alone's tiny sustenance coughs.

If time is a dare, you yes life more times than any of us.

Because of such suchness, I watch you sleep, the sound of seeds cracking dark
in my ear.

When a butterfly steps, the caterpillar asks:

          What parts of you become me? 
          What particles become doorways?
          What metamorphosis concludes in orgasm?

If fear is the flame, berate those who were not you? 

A woman in a corner knows that no one counts on her to age without judgment.

Because in the appendix of history, science is a study of how mutual bodies
diverge the way maps are windows only falling through makes sense.

When we are together, I push you to watch myself fall.

If cows are pigs and pigs are chickens, the key is hidden directly in the seen.
Any secret can be but the barn is full of everything.

To break English, instruments make beauty
of unapproved grammar, a society misshapen
as it is always becoming, voices filled with quiet, billowing countrysides.

When words do things we didn't do alive,
ghosts are legal rules in the measures of spirits writing their own laws.

Because Of Life In The Meaning Of Physics

I have given up on importance.
The only things awake to awareness
are things that no longer compute
when we walk to banks or teach signs in classrooms
to make sense of dark matter.
E equals life times time times how often you find love.

But because love is never a phase, life barks a path to dark matter.
Our bony fingers feel without thinking for hollows behind bones.
Because listening to your breath is a crying out, the hollow address behind your pelvic
bone echoes the purchase of a room full of babies in song.

We are all born motherless.
Until we depart on the rafts of separate hungers.

Because love is a motor, we engine to imaginary places like dark matter
and work theories to make them real.
Singing out is a dare for the speakers inside us.
The walks we take are sketches of who we think we are,
choices in the visions of what we don’t know in passage.
Turn the page to Pi to converge with where am I going, who are you now.

The Fear That Is Nothing At All

When daybreak comes, I hope you find
we need only be question marks.
What the future holds, a forever horizon. 
That is a lie. There is no future but the present
And the present.
There are stories you
sit down and read us on a rainy day.
We are the perfect activity to get lost in.
Because the pages aloud appear in fruit-colors,
we know words have
at least two meanings.
Red-spring. Blue-summer.
For starters.
You are a person whose organs
you call home first. 
Flesh is the nest
you build on.
You are a person where pain is a Paris
you advertise for an underground nurse.
No one calls, but the skylines!
Truth comes in the shape
of a talking rabbit
who will always say,
"Bring me chocolate."
You think shadows burn your back
when you face the sun.
Beauty shows the development
of flowers around you each spring.
You think in this knowledge
lies a method.
You let them unfold
their system of living and document it.
You call the rest of us Lazarus,
despite our lack
of biblical defeat.
These are the seasons
we haven’t reached yet.
This feeling is adjacent to a deep grey pigeon
pecking death's heels:
You know it’s there
but flight is a shape we haven’t made yet.
Jumping from planes is one way to name it. 

The Culture Of Cosmology

The moon flexes at the thought that
rain is fireproof. The moon’s reflexes are humanity turning to snow.

Because life can lie, an axe sleeps in the middle of frozen souls’ marrow.

However Earth
is not central, a handful of food growing birds available,
the always returning.
Beings from clay are reflection and dark soil. 

Flight itself is a vodka, rum, whiskey & moonshine,
a mess of everything that waits. Everything that won’t.
Let us gambol as divining rods
holding fast to the diction of we do what we want,
the when of wanting now.

We have no use of material.
We are the Amish. Want uses anything regardless of purpose.
We need only God: we need only his question mark.

Nothing but love for water as rain is its falling form.
Nothing but love for fire as light in its chiseled form.

We love the way we expect to be loved, 
echoing immortals who are a promise
tucked into the seams of our decline, the inevitable never
that propels as a rudder we name and walk around in,
disguised as our selves.

Amy King received the 2015 Women’s National Book Association
Award. Her latest collection, The Missing Museum, received the 2015
Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize. She serves on the executive board of
VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and is an Associate Professor of
Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College. Editing
projects include the anthologies Big Energy Poets of the
Anthropocene: When Ecopoets Think Climate Change (with
Heidi Lynn Staples) and Bettering American Poetry 2015. 

Published September 2016.